coÖperatives and everything, but he never used the word 'union' until 1965, when the strike began." One of the early memhers was a man named Manuel Rivera Rivera came to Chavez in 1963 with the complaint that his labor contractor not only had refused to tel] him what his hourly wage was for work already done but, when he protested, had kicked him out of the truck and let him walk back to town; the police had shown no interest in his case. Chavez learned that Rivera's old car had bro- ken down for good, and that the Rivera family had spent three days at the bus station in Delano. The Chavezes took the whole family in to their own small house and lent RIvera an old Volvo. When Rivera had saved a little money and was ready to move on, he said, "How much do I owe you?" and Chavez answered that he didn't owe anything; he owed help to other farm workers. After returning Chavez's old car all polished up, Rivera left I)elano, and Chavez soon forgot about him. Six months later, Rivera showed up again. Over Chavez's protest, he paid union dues for all the months since Chavez had taken him in, and on the job spoke so fervently of Chavez to other WOl kers that he eventually brought in more than a hundred new members. (In 1966, Rivera was run down and permanently crippled by a :flatbed truck belonging to a grower whose fields were being picketed. ) The organizing work has always gone slowly, and it was es- pecially difficult at first. Man- uel Chavez still has his 1963 N.F.W.A. card. On it, along with a green eagle, is print- ed "Delano Local Numher 2. Cesar Chavez, General Director. Manuel Chavez, Secretary-Treasurer." Manuel laughed as he showed It to me. "I guess Cesar was one local and I was the other . We were the membership, too. It's a good thing Richard was still a carpenter-he was kind of supporting us." In this dark period, Chavez, who was pen- niless, turned down a job, at twenty-one thousand dollars a year, as director of the Peace Corps in a four-country region of South f\.merica. Chave7 held on, and by Au- gust, 1964, his association had a thousand members. A num- ber of these new members, In- cluding Julio Hernandez, who is now a unIon officer, came .... ' - --- ,.-- - ----- --- ........... ... -- --=- from the town of Corcoran, about twenty-five miles northwest of Delano. I t was in Corcoran, on October 4, 1933, that five thousand cotton pickers, many of them Mexicans, began a strike that spread up and down the cotton fields of the San Joaquin Valley, and eventually involved eighteen thou- sand workers. As was customary in the Depression, wages had been drastically pushed down by advertising for many more workers than could be used, then letting starving men with starving families underbid each other for jobs, until the pay ran as low as fifteen cents an hour. V\Then the cot- ton pickers struck, the growers armed themsel ves and, after evictIng the strikers from their camps, followed them to a rally in Pixley, just north of Delano, where they opened fire on the crowd and killed two workers. A third worker was murdered the same day at Arvin, a town southeast of Delano, in Kern County. Eleven growers were arrested and eleven were acquitted. The strike, which lasted for twenty-four days, won a small wage increase for the workers, but the leaders of the union that ran the strike-the Cannery and Agricul- tural Workers Industrial Union, an unabashedly pro-Communist organiza- tion-were :flogged, tarred and feath- ered, and finalIy jailed. At the time of the Corcoran strike, an assistant sheriff was quoted as saying, "w e protect our farmers here in Kern County. They are our best people. " I \ I' .. " / '- . I f$ 1 ( -' ./l ' - -' ------- 51 They are always with us. They keep the country going. They put us in here and they can put us out agaIn, so we serve them. But the Mexicans are trash. They have no standard of hv- ing. We herd them like pigs." Like the signs of Chavez's childhood that read "No DOGS OR MEXICANS AL- LOWED," remarks of this sort are con- sidered poor public relations these days, but the underlying attitude, I \vas told by members of Chavez's union, is still very much alive. After a new surge in memhership, Mrs. Chavez left the fields to work full time at running the credit union, and Mrs. Huerta took over the bookkeeping and other responsibilities. At about this time, a man named Gilbert Padilla was assigned by the Migrant Ministry to work with Drake on the problem of improving conditions in labor camps run by the counties of Kern and Tu- lare for migrant workers. A large-scale rent strike organized in the Linnell and W oodvIlle camps of Tulare County b) Drake and Padilla and a lawyer named Gary BelIow finally closed them down and led to the construction of new camp buildings. "The county was making a big profit on those camps, which were just slums," Drake told me. "When the workers found out about that profit, it wasn't hard to or- ganize a rent strike." The workers Drake and Padilla had organized dur- ing their rent strike came into Chavez's association in February, 1965, and in the summer of that year Pad;na led '"1!k'\. .... ' , - ----- . " t , r .. ,C,JI " "" \ & 1 ./ -